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The argument of this fine book is necessary, timely and of overwhelming importance. Based around an analysis of William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825), and the author's therapeutic practice with addicts, it is a synthesis of depth psychology, theology, philosophy and art that depicts who we are, and what we must transform into, if the planet and humanity are to survive.
Here the addict stands for all of us born into Western modernity's exploitative relation to the Other. With a hard ego formed by broken attachments to the whole, the modern person relates to reality as a succession of dead objects, dead because we have no psychic connection to them. Hence the Western addiction to consumption, which is rendered visible in the pandemic of addiction to substances and harmful activities. Those we call addicts are imprisoned in their literal compulsions. More truly, those addicted to opioids, alcohol etc. should be regarded as living symbols of the 21st century's degraded psyches.
Fortunately, as this book demonstrates with immense conviction and superb clarity, the therapeutic treatment of addicts demonstrates a way for all of us to radically change our orientation to the ecosphere. From being trapped in a repetition compulsion to exploit the world as if it were a dead object, we may, with extreme difficulty, evolve a new kind of self that reconnects us to the whole as spiritually alive. We may move from a desolate psyche of plundering the world to a new consciousness of becoming. Wright calls the new mutable self a “consciousness of resonance”.
The crucial point is that the new self cannot be static, Wright argues with the assistance of philosophy (A. N. Whitehead) and quantum physics (David Bohm); that the real self is a process embedded in a reciprocal, ever-changing whole. Such a perspective gives new depth to the analytical psychology vision of the self evolving as part of the whole cosmos evolving. We are an attribute of the whole, and that includes b